“Focusing on Value” — with Vitaly Pecherskiy, Co-Founder & COO StackAdapt
Today, we’re speaking with Vitaly Pecherskiy, Co-Founder & COO of StackAdapt. We discuss Vitaly’s lessons from his grandfather, how he ended up in the world of digital marketing, and StackAdapt being one of Toronto’s leading tech companies.
Today’s episode of Journey Map is brought to you by MindManager.
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Welcome to Journey Map, the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Today’s guest attended Telfer Business School graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce in Finance. He also took International Business Marketing at Rouen Business School. He began his career as a Financial Analyst at the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. He went on to work as a Project Administrator at the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, as well as work as a Research Analyst for Industry Canada. He moved into the world of digital marketing working as an account manager with AdParlour and then Xaxis. In 2014 he becomes Co-Founder and COO of StackAdapt. For those of you who don’t know StackAdapt is a Toronto-based advertising technology company. They have a self-serve programmatic advertising platform, Ad buyers plan, execute, and manage data-driven native advertising campaigns across all devices, leveraging proprietary data, inventory and publisher partners.
Today’s episode of Journey Map is brought to you by MindManager. Journey Map listeners know that with the right map you can take your career anywhere you set your mind to. MindManager work management software puts your ideas, plans and projects on the path to success by transforming them into dynamic digital maps, charts, diagrams and more. Mind Managers flexible visual format makes it easy to capture, organize, understand and evolve critical business information and with powerful collaboration sharing features it’s the perfect tool for keeping remote teams aligned, on track and headed in the right direction.You can take a free thirty day no commitment trial today by visiting www.mindmanager.com/journeymap.
DH: Today we’re talking to Vitaly Pecherskiy, Co-Founder and CEO of StackAdapt. Vitaly, welcome to Journey Map!
VP: Dave thanks a lot for having me.
DH: When I read the resume to you, you spend some time here in Ottawa you know did you live in Ottawa before going to school at Telfer? or what did you come to this city due to your education?
VP: I grew up and finished my high school in Russia and then I immigrated to Canada. So I spent two years in Thunder Bay going to Lakehead University, and then I applied to the University of Ottawa and that’s how I ended up being in Ottawa. I only spent about 3.5 years finishing my degree in Ottawa and then I moved to Toronto and 10 years later now my wife is actually from Chelsea Quebec so now Ottawa is back into my life. I really like the city though.
DH: That’s great, well you know what I’m going to point out is that you have what I call a very classic Ottawa millennial timeline, in terms of graduating and working for a major association, a non profit, and with a major government organization at Industry Canada before then jumping ship and joining a private sector technology company. That to me is the classic journey of an Ottawa millennial coming out of school.
VP:I was incredibly lucky actually because when I graduated this was right after the 2008 crisis so you know the government was the only one that was hiring so being in Ottawa was very beneficial for me to get that early experience. Then once I moved to Toronto I already had a lot of experience under my belt so it was easier for me to kind of grow faster in my career. So in that sense I was pretty lucky.
DH: Yeah I’d say so, listen I have two questions that are related to your time in those nonprofit governments and associations sectors which you there are a lot here in Ottawa. First one you graduate with a degree in finance and you contrast that to what you’re doing today and the industry that you work in today are quite different. So when you graduated in finance like what were the steps that would eventually lead you to the advertising industry?
VP: So it was incredibly random actually. You know when I graduated I was pretty determined to get into a career of maybe investment banking or private equity. So that was the whole idea behind moving to Toronto, so once I moved to Toronto I started looking for jobs in that sector but you know I think I was fairly naive about what it takes to to land a job in one of those firms. Naturally there’s so many graduates from many schools in Ontario chasing these jobs so you have to really stand out. Maybe my resume wasn’t as flashy, I think it was hard for me to break into the door. So the reason I got into digital advertising was because that was the job I was able to land. I was basically walking into different offices and asking for a job and one of them was a start up that was doing advertising on Facebook kind of before Facebook really blew up from the advertising perspective so back in like 2010 or 2011. With them I kind of learned the ropes of early digital advertising, these were like the early days of programmatic so by the time I started StackAdapt I think I’d already had maybe 3 years under my belt. So I understood kind of the key trends in the space, and together with my two other co founders we clearly understood that everything is heading towards more automation, everything in the future like advertising specifically will be bought programmatically. So we were just basically building software for our former selves. I think that’s why we’ve been pretty successful, because we solved the industry from the inside, we knew the problems that we had and we wanted to solve them through our product.
DH: I want to shift gears just really quickly, you have one of the best personal blogs and personal websites that I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m not just trying to butter you up I’m a big fan of it. You have an article that you wrote just recently on March 17th called “A lesson in leadership from my grandfather” it’s a really great article. If you were to summarize what you’re writing about you know please do so and also why did you want to write this piece when you did?
VP: Yeah well first of all I appreciate that you’re reading my blog, you know it started as you know I really wanted to kind of share some lessons from starting the company and share business lessons, but as I continued writing I think I developed more of a passion for topics outside of business as well. So this specific article about leadership unfortunately my grandfather is not around anymore but he was definitely a person that everybody in our family looked up to. He was a director in a research institution leading hundreds of scientists in the field of nuclear research and he was a really stand up person mostly because of his personality and specifically leadership skills. This article really talks about how one time he went to China and they were collaborating on a sort of a research project and so he was a scientist sent from Russia to help implement some sort of new process I’m not entirely sure of the scope of the project but this is told through my mother. When he arrives there because you know it back in China everything is just being built so fast and obviously in the early nineties they were not held to the same level of scrutiny that you know that they are probably being held to now around cleanliness of research projects. So a lot of the work was happening on kind of ground floors as the higher floors were still being built so there’s a lot of dust and he knew that there’s a lot of really sensitive equipment that needs to be taken care of. So after asking for about a couple weeks for staff to clean up this dust because it’s going to ruin the equipment, he gives up and you know grabs a mop and just starts wiping the floors. I thought that was really cool because with the attitude that he brought forward he was very positive and friendly but you know he also really brought forward this roll up your sleeves type of attitude that I really try to follow as well in everything I do in our company.
DH: Thanks for sharing that the last sentence is obviously where I wanted to segue and go into your Chief Operating Officer Role. I think that the Chief Operating Officer role is one of those mysterious black holes where in every company it kind of means different things in different organizations. There’s lot’s that has been written about the relationship between a CEO and a COO. Oftentimes COO is described as covering the areas of weakness that the CEO has and all this kind of stuff. So when you think about being a COO of a company that you helped found and what your role is today how does that article directly translate for you?
VP: Yeah so there’s three founders in our company so myself Ildar who’s the CEO and Yang who is the CTO. So obviously it’s myself and Yang who lead our data science technology, our jobs don’t overlap that much because I don’t come from software background, but with Ildar we have very complimentary roles, we’ve worked together now for almost seven years so we’ve experimented a lot and found that balance of what really works for us. He has mechanical engineering as his background so he’s very data driven and loves to be in operations, but I take a lot of customer centric roles and a lot of evangelization for the business. So our roles in some ways reversed and I think that’s totally fine because like you said COO and CEO it’s something that has to be worked out in any company and these roles can be really tailored to each individual strengths. But in my role as a founder I just think of myself as an expert in StackAdapt you know I understand all our teams, I know how they function, I know the industry, and I know the customer. My job on a day to day basis is trying to optimize how we work to create more value for customers and operate more efficiently, kind of looking forward to understanding what sort of roadblocks we might have in the future and trying to mitigate these obstacles, connecting all dots and unlocking opportunities. It’s very unstructured, and it’s kind of hard to put on a resume, but like I know what I do every day.
DH: Yeah well it’s funny through my research and the research that we did on you in advance of this interview. I think of you in that COO vein that’s very similar to Harley at Shopify for example where almost like this breaking down of the barriers when it comes to being the public face of the brand of the business. Compared to where you may normally think of it’s the CEO who is that public face. What is it about your personality or what were the experiences that you’ve had in life that lead you to being this kind of comfortable face of StackAdapt to the world and having this great personal website to go along with it?
VP: I appreciate it, I think I overcome barriers every single day, every time I want to share something on social media, or every time I volunteer to speak onstage, or be out there putting my name on something public facing. I have to go through some sort of decision process and ask myself like “Do I want to expose myself to that extra scrutiny potentially?” and generally the answer is yes. I really love challenging myself and I derive a lot of pleasure from interacting with a lot of people. I love collecting feedback from our customers, I love putting my name on a lot of outward communication that we put out. So if people do reach out usually it ends up on my desk and I love hearing firsthand how people work with our company and what sorts of problems we solve for them, what we don’t solve for them, and how we can do it better. So being out there it kind of creates a platform for people just to know StackAdapt in maybe a more personal way and feel more comfortable kind of choosing us as their partner.
DH: When you think about all you’ve learned from those times at Lakehead University or the University of Ottawa to where you are today. I mean we could have gotten into all the amazing things you guys have done, I think last year you were ranked as Toronto’s fastest growing tech company, raised tons of money, you’ve got 170 plus employees and probably even higher now. You’ve done a lot of really amazing things. When you think about 5 to 10 years out from now, what do you want to remain the same about your role as it is now and what do you hope will continue to evolve?
VP: You know in many ways my role has already evolved into that role that I’ve really wanted to hold. Obviously when you’re starting a company from scratch and you know for the first 6 months we were working out of my kitchen. Back then we had to go every single thing ourselves, now we have so much more leverage because we have five more people joining on Monday so we have more than 180 people now. It’s really about leverage and now I feel that we really have this like one plus one equals 3 type of environment, where it feels like our growth is accelerating more and more. In many ways I’m not even sort of in control of how the company grows because there are teams that are taking initiatives to launch products or run with ideas that I’m not 100 percent even sure how they work or what they are about. I have trust that we’ve you know been able to onboard them and show our company’s values in a way that would empower them to make the right decisions. So in that sense I’m already kind of in that stage where I’ve always wanted to be, where I work with a lot of different people but you know the company is its own being now, and it has a lot of momentum it’s almost like a snowball effect at this point. It’s awesome that we’ve been able to launch it and to get us to this point, but at this point I have so much faith in our team to be able to continue growing it further and further.
DH: If you were to think about your career on an emotional timeline what is the lowest point that you can remember and why would you say that’s it?
VP: Yeah it’s actually a pretty easy question for me because I know exactly that moment. After I left AdParlour which was a great experience I really was ready or at least I thought I was ready at least emotionally to start my own company. But you know I tried a number of them before I joined Xaxis and in that time well with me trying a couple companies with few of my friends realizing that we didn’t really have that strong founder alignment, and these companies really not going anywhere. Then there was me running out of cash and recognizing that I needed that next career opportunity to kind of hold me off until maybe I’m ready to try again. But coming from all this amazing experience of Facebook advertising, I thought I was going to land my next job very easily but that was not the case at all. I felt like I was thrown back a couple years after almost as if I just graduated, I was still feeling very lost. In those moments your self esteem is very low, so those were pretty difficult times. I was lucky that eventually I did land a job and I met my co-founders and everything else since then has been more or less pretty positive.
DH: Your website, I keep referencing it. I will include a link to it in the show notes but you refer to your blog as “Lessons and opinions on each growing businesses and growing up”, what has been the biggest of all these things you’ve written about what has been the life lesson about growing up or still growing up that if you could go back to you know yourself at 7,8,or 9 years old and say “Hey here’s the big lesson I’ve learned I’m gonna tell you what it was” what do you think it would be?
VP: That’s a great question so actually every birthday I try to publish a kind of lessons I learned that year and on my 30th birthday, I did kind of a summary of all my key lessons for my second decade. So there’s definitely a lot of lessons and I think the lesson would depend on who I talked to. You know if I was talking to a 7 year old, myself being at 7 I’m not sure I would be able to remember any of these valuable lessons. If I was to maybe talk to myself when I was say 22 or maybe 24 and I wanted to to tell myself something it would probably focus on value creation rather than trying to chase money. It’s easy to get consumed by money because everything around us has a price you look at when you go shopping everything has a dollar amount attached to it, you get paid in dollars, so you can see a cheque every single day. But when you start focusing on the value it’s first of all a lot harder to quantify, but second of all I think it doesn’t have that sort of limit that you can put on it. So if I was 22 year old and I was focusing on how I can get a job that makes me $60,000 or $65,000 I think it’s inevitable that you’ll find yourself limiting yourself in some ways. I think if I was asking myself you know what can I do for you for the company that is interesting to me? How can we solve problems for more organizations? or how can we solve problems for millions of people? I think that would not only lead to better career opportunities for me but also it would probably translate into higher impact from a revenue perspective or from a money making opportunities. So I would say focus on the value rather than dollars, but I probably have like a million other smaller lessons.
DH: Well they’re all there people can read about them like I said we’re gonna include links to where people can find more information about you and this blog I keep referencing, also more information about StackAdapt of course. It was a real pleasure having you on today, and thank you so much for sharing a little bit about your journey. I’m sure this is not the last we’re going to be hearing from you, something tells me that there’s a lot more growth and success in the near and distant future for both you and the company. So thank you again for taking the time to join us and hopefully we can do this again sometime.
VP: Dave thank you very much.
